COLONIAL INDEPENDENCE. [From the Times, December 24.]

New Zealand Spectator and Cook's Strait Guardian, Volume VI, Issue 498, 11 May 1850, Page 4

COLONIAL INDEPENDENCE. [From the Times, December 24.]

Mr. Cobden's speech at Bradford on our colonial system is a masterpiece of agitation. It is a sufficient answer to those simple souls who think that agitation ever dies, or is likely to die, in this world. We have no wish to disparage a trade which, besides its uses, appears to be a necessity of our existence. If the man is to be honoured who brought philosophy from Heaven down to men, we presume that some praise is due to the man who brings politics from Downing-street to Bradford. The schoolmaster is abroad ; if any one doubts it, let him read Mr. Cobden's "Colonial Policy made 'easy to the-, meanest Capacities,", and he will see that whatever difficulties and scruples may perplex Parliament or the Colonial Office, it is as plain as A, B, C, in the Temperance Hall, at Bradford. The artizans there have learnt one simple rule of dealing with all dependencies, from Vancouver's Island to Ceylon, and from Canada to Corfu. The rule is not exactly the rule of thumb, but certainly is not more artificial. It consists in' cutting the connection altogether, or at least as expeditiously as is agreeable to both parties. Should the colonies still cling to us like "mammy-sick" children, Mr. Cobden suggests that we should

wean them at once from the sweets of the British Exchequer. Should England, on the contrary, still push her parental authority, the colonies would do well, or rather are already I doing well, in showing that they are no longer children. The same rule holds for the whole family. England is to send to all our fifty colonies a circular certificate that they have come to man's estate and are free. They bate only to send back a message equally obliging, and the famous Mother Country, of whom we have heard so much in grave school books and conversational pamphlets, may forthwith throw up her cap, and sing, in the lines of the old stave :—: — " I care for nobody, no not I, And nobody cares for me." But let us look a little into this new agitation. We will neither be fascinated by its simplicity, nor abashed by its grandeur. In the first place the subject matter is a good one. It is as good as Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill, or the Repeal of the Corn Laws ; — nay, granting those three premises, —granting that England has. now forsworn religious, civil, and commercial monopoly, colonial independence is a necessary sequel to those great national acts. The doctrine has now gone through all its ordeals. It has been talked about and written about. It is the conclusion of a long controversy, and among many proposals is that which survives. In several leading instances it is the actual state of the colonial game. By a natural process the leading colonies have worked up to it, and their independence is a great fact, whether ! we like it or not. The doctrinaires, Wakefield, Roebuck, Buller, Moleswortb, have culled all the statistics, and arguments of the question, and nothing remains to be written or calculated upon it. Blue-books have been accumulated ad nauseam, till the labour of their perusal is so great as to be an excuse for utter ignorance of the subject. When the question is in this state, the old theory of a great Zollverein is suddenly abandoned. Only the other day men still dreamt that it was possible to stretch England like a belt round the globe, and buy and sell chiefly with our own fellow-subjects. That is past away. Meanwhile the estimates show the enormous expenditure of solid coin which we suffer for a merely sentimental return. One thing only was wanting, and that is now supplied. The colonies, after going through nearly the same process of argument, have arrived at precisely lire- same conclusion. They announce to us and 'o the whole wotld in the most energetic and striking manner that they will be independent. Thus the facts of the case almost anticipate our own hesitating judgments and tedious calculations. All this time our firstborn colony shows the way, and stamps on the most loyal and roost imperial mind the sure conviction that, sooner or later, every other colony will set up for itself, and that this is the order of nature and of Providence. Such is Cobden's case ; and, if Cobden had not been born, the case would be the same. Finding it, however, he picks it up, and by his singular gifts of agitation, will probably make it his own. We have described a great controversy, a great conclusion, and a great fact, which severally force the idea of colonial independence on the public mind. How, then, does Mr. Cobden appropriate the idea ? First, he reduces it to the simplest and most popular form, by treating it merely as a question of economy and independence. " Save your own pockets, and give the colonists their liberty. Let the tie grow less and less at the pleasure of both parties, till it is attenuated or sublimed into the growing sympathy that binds the British empire to the United States." If the matter does, indeed, depend on a vote ; if the separation could be effected by merely tearing a bond, or dissolving a legal partnership ; if it could be done once for all with each and I every one of our colonies, and the matter were] sure to end there, then, certainly, we rnigj/^J save our ten millions, more or less, and maf^ the colonists happy. But in most, if not aIMJ of the fifty instances to be dealt with, there I are difficulties which could not be thus quickly disposed of. It is questionable whether a single colony can be independent with safety to population or commerce. Mr. Cobden takes the strongest case, that of the Cape ; and he quotes for his purpose a distinguished military authority, the Rev. Dr. Adamson. This divine points out pretty clearly to the lambs of his flock, that their geographical and social position offers peculiar facilities for shutting out British interference, and taking to the trade of piracy. Granted. But unfortunately they have frontier as well as coast to defend, and Caffres at well as British to keep out. There may be another Caffre war, and that war a war of extermination. Should the Caffres be worsted we can easily imagine that the British and Dutch Boers would soon balance in South Africa the Cave of Dahra in the north ; not much to the credit of the British name. Should the colonists be worsted, it is not likely that England would sit still at home or sail I quietly past the Cape, while merciless savi- 1

ges were carrying death and destruction to the very walls of Cape-town. Mere instinct-would compel us to interfere. With such a danger and such an interference in prospect, a statesman will consider some time before he resigns a colony to its discretion and its defences. With all the smaller settlements in Australia and elsewhere the case is still stronger. The colonial politicians themselves think to meet the difficulty by proposing a defensive and offensive league ; or, in other words that England shall retain the power of settling the foreign relations of fifty Lilliputian states scattered over the globe. Mr. Cobden is judiciously silent on this point. He abstains from filling tip the blank with any positive suggestion. He knows full well that a league, offensive and defensive, with fifty helpless and quarrelsome little communities, most of them at the antipodes, and the rest in the jaws of our greatest rival, is simply a chimera. Such leagues can only be made with full and well-established states, or with near neighbours. They suppose common interests and facilities for mutual counsel and co-operation. They suppose a mutual and equivalent service. There could be nothing of the kind with our fifty colonies.' Yet — and here is the great natural difficulty of thequestion, should we allow our own offspring to be devastated and reduced without rushing to their aid? Would not nature restore the colonial system when political economy bad destroyed it? Mr. Cobden says nothing on this points. Such misgivings interfere with the force of popular appeals, and find little favour with professional agitators. After supplying the people of Bradford with two simple reasons for sending the colonies adrift, the agitator's next object is togive an equally compendious and intelligent account of the opposition he is likely to meet with. Mr. Cobden gives his hearers to understand in very plain terms, that the colonial system is kept up in this country for the sake of the patronage it involves ; in other words, that we go to an expense of perhaps £10,000,000 a year for the sake of the Governorships, deputy Governorships, and other appointments at the disposal of the Colonial Minister, and the indefinite multiplication of Generals, Colonels, Admirals, and Captains. Now it may suit Mr. Cobden's purpose to say that our colonies are simply a ministerial job ; but a person of common sense and common candour will assign to a very different cause the favour with which they are regarded. The bulk of the educated classes have been taught to regard the colonies as almost indispensable to the commerce, the power, and especially the glory*